*I will never forget the year 2004: Usher was the hottest entertainer on the planet, due to the CD red-hot Confessions, and all of my music journalist peers were clamoring for an interview…..except me.
Why? Because I’d gotten wind of Anita Baker returning to the mix after 10 years away from recording and touring and I was hell-bent on chatting her up. Despite her rep as being on the testy side, I found Ms. Baker to be warm, gracious and candid, so I wanted to share another vintage gem with you and help those who are fans understand the painstaking process that went into her comeback. Read and enjoy….*
That rich, throaty alto is synonymous with midnight love and quiet storms, embodying a style so revered and so renowned that even rappers such as Kanye and Twista know “a little Anita, will definitely set this party off right …”
And now she’s back. Anita Baker’s first album in 10 years, My Everything, hits stores on Tuesday. Its first single, “You’re My Everything,” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 single charts.
Ms. Baker has sold 13 million albums and won eight Grammys. But a decade after all that, would fans still be amorous for Anita? She tested the waters in 2003 with a successful mini-tour — in Dallas, she appeared with Maze featuring Frankie Beverly at Smirnoff Music Centre. Still, the questions buzzed. When would she record another album? And where had the diva been all this time?
“I can’t stay in the light too long; it hurts my eyes.” Ms. Baker, 46, relates by phone from New York. “As much as you give it, it wants more back. That can kinda hurt you.”
With warmth and candor, the singer, songwriter and producer recalls the whirlwinds during the last decade that drove her away from, then back to, music.
‘Caught up in life’
“I always have to pull back and recharge, ‘cuz it takes me forever to do a record, and then we go on the road. That’s two years out of my life on one project, so I usually take a year off, then another six to eight months to do the next one. But this time, I really just got caught up in life.
“When we did Rhythm of Love, my husband [real estate developer Walter Bridgeforth Jr.] and I had two little boys come into the world [Walter, now 11, and Edward, 10], and we were schlepping those kids all over the country. We had collapsible strollers, 2 ½ nannies, three security people, 32 people in production, 18 people on stage….” Ms. Baker laughs at the madness of it all.
“Oh, my God, it was a circus. My intention was to just pull back for a year and relax, but the boys started growing, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll just go to New York for about a week and try to write this stuff and come back,’ and I couldn’t stay away a week. So then I said, ‘You know what? I’m a start trying to record over in Nashville; I’ll just be gone over the weekend,’ and I couldn’t stay away a weekend. And it just came to me that any time away from them was too long. And so, at one point, I was like, ‘I’m not going.’ ”
Parents needed her
But even as she reconciled her professional choices with motherhood, her own parents needed care. In the span of three years, Ms. Baker watched them succumb to illness and almost lost the desire to sing entirely.
“My adoptive mom had Alzheimer’s, and from there it just went downhill. My dad had cancer; she got sick first and it killed him. It was very bizarre. My birth mother passed a year before my dad did. We were pretty immersed in that, and it wasn’t such a great time. When your parents are sick, it’s such a cruel thing but a rite of passage that everyone’s going to have to go through at some point.”
“In the midst of all of that, I was trying to write and sing. I had just negotiated my release from Elektra and went over to Atlantic. But unfortunately, I just couldn’t finish the record for them. They held that door open as long as they could, but I got dropped, and it was just a question of being with my parents or out singing somewhere.
“The choice was made for me. It’s not that I was so noble a person and said, ‘Oh, I’m going to not sing.’ I couldn’t; the music wouldn’t come.”
Filling a void
In 2002, after her adoptive mother died, Ms. Baker says that she discovered a yawning void that her husband and sons could no longer fill.
“It put me on the couch for a while; I was laying around eating cake because I was just weak from it. I had been so used to taking care of her, so what am I gonna do now? I went to get the boys and they were like, ‘Mom, we got our breakfast already and we’re about to go roller skating.’ It just started to occur to me that I needed to find myself again.
“My mother’s breathing her last in my arms breathed life into me. I went to my music with a vengeance. God is good; when He flung open that door, I ran into it. It was like, if you love chocolate or Tootsie Rolls and you haven’t had one, like, in 10 years and finally get one, that’s how it felt.”
Given her reputation for crafting her music until it’s just right, Ms. Baker says the recording process for Everything wrapped in record speed.
“We started at the end of April in a studio called the Soup Can in Detroit, where I haven’t cut anything since Rapture, and I handed this in towards the end of July; for example, ‘Men in My Life’ was recorded from one take. It came right, and it came quick. Another reason why was because I didn’t have to leave my family. I could go to the studio, then drive home and have dinner with everybody, the boys could come down and play on the drums and piano, be crazy. … It was just great.”
Few artists have the luxury of spending such a long time away from the scene without losing the interest and loyalty of their fans, and some who return struggle to accommodate the industry’s present trends and changes. Ms. Baker, however, saw only one option; to remain true to herself and her artistry.
She contacted Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note Records, and asked to join the label’s roster, which includes Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones.
So she has a new label and a new collaborator (Barry Eastmond). But Everything’s sultry, fireside grooves — from her remake of the Yellowjackets’ “I Can’t Sleep” to the tender family tribute, “Men in My Life” — are still unmistakably Anita.
“Sometimes I wish I could change, but I don’t know how. I only know how to do me. All I’m ever interested in with my music is expressing what’s in my heart. I’ve never been interested in being a muse for a producer to express his creativity. I think the industry pressures artists to conform to whatever is happening at the time, and I’ve been a nonconformist my whole life.”
Against the odds
It was this maverick mind-set that propelled Anita Baker to stardom against the odds. Born in Ohio, raised in Detroit, the gospel and jazz vocalist began singing with various local groups in 1975. At 16, she joined the band Chapter 8. The group released one album in 1979, then Arista acquired Chapter 8’s record label, Ariola, and dropped the group, declaring that Ms. Baker “couldn’t sing.”
Three years later, Ms. Baker, who had reluctantly shelved her dream to work as a law firm receptionist, was coaxed to Los Angeles by a record executive and recorded her debut, The Songstress. The album made it onto the charts and got her signed to Elektra in 1985. A year later, she and former Chapter 8 member Michael J. Powell created Rapture. The sensual, jazz-soaked grooves (“Sweet Love,” “No One in the World,” “Caught Up in the Rapture”) immediately set Ms. Baker apart from her R&B peers, and future albums (Giving You the Best That I Got, Compositions and Rhythm of Love) only cemented her position among the most sophisticated and successful of the quiet-storm set.
Ms. Baker says she has only praise and high hopes for the new girls in the game.
“Oh, my gosh, there’s India. Arie, Miss Beyoncé and the girls from Destiny’s Child; they’re amazing talents. There’s Jill Scott, Alicia Keys … the industry is in good hands. These kids own their music and marketing; they have their own clothing lines. … They’re not coming into the industry just subservient, and I’ve got a great respect for that.”
With a 2005 summer tour in the works “after the boys finish school,” Ms. Baker promises once again to give her fans the very best sh
